Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Cholula

1864

Name(s) currently unknown

Cholula, MEX

About 70 miles from Mexico City, the Catholic church of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios crowns the huge mass of Cholula’s great pre-Hispanic pyramid complex, a sprawling set of plazas and pyramids built around the 10th century. By the 13th century, well before the arrival of the Spaniards, it seems to have fallen into disuse. 16th century Spanish observers said it looked like an overgrown hill.

At the top of the pyramid, the church is dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy, the Virgin Mary as protector of the living and intercessor on behalf of souls. This church, finished in 1864, replaced an earlier one built in the 17th century. The great pyramid had a mud brick and rubble core and was once was covered by an exterior face of finished stonework. Its base has been partially reconstructed in modern times. The scale and formal design gives a sense of the sacred site’s built environment in its heyday.

The great pyramid was the work of indigenous builders, working over centuries. Early mounds may have dated to the 1st century, the time that the metropolis of Teotihuacan was being built. The early earthworks still lie at the heart of the present pyramid, which was continuously enlarged over the centuries. After the conquest, the pyramid became the base for Catholic shrines. Some simple construction, perhaps merely a platform with a cross, seems to have been erected at the top of the pyramid by Cholula’s Franciscans in the 16th century. A larger chapel followed, finished in 1666. This chapel is recorded in 19th century engravings of the pyramid, but was replaced with the present church in 1864.

Pre-Columbian architects aimed to create massive solid platforms upon which perched small sacred shrines. Their approach was quite different from that introduced by friars, which emphasized the creation of large interior spaces. The dismantling of the pyramid, begun in ancient times, continued under the Spaniards. Any extant cut facing stones were likely removed to build Cholula’s many 16th-century churches. The exposed mud brick eroded, and a map of Cholula from 1580 shows the pyramid’s base to be cut through by newly laid city streets.

Cholula was a largely indigenous city through the colonial period, and once an important pre-Hispanic religious center, dedicated to the cult of the deity Quetzalcoatl. The pyramid below the church, which some believe may have been one of the largest of all pre-Hispanic constructions, was rebuilt several several times by pre-Columbian people and served as a pilgrimage site. Today, Cholula is famous for its large number of colonial-period churches—with each neighborhood having its own.

For modern viewers, the sight of a church on a pyramid makes visible the imposition of Christianity on native religion. In the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in indigenous towns, friars consciously tried to erase visible reminders of pre-Hispanic religion (and pre-Hispanic structures also were a convenient source for building materials). Unlike the great Templo Mayor in Mexico City, which was razed to street level, the great pyramid at Cholula was simply left as an overgrown ruin, eventually melding with the surrounding landscape.

Elizabeth Hill Boone

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Kubler, George. 1985. “The Colonial Plan of Cholula.” Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler. Thomas Reese, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Vázquez Gutiérrez, I. P. n.d. “Estudio Monográfico Del Santuario de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios en Cholula Puebla.” Unpublished Master’s thesis in Art History, Departamento de Filosofía y Letras, Escuela de Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. May, 1998.